The communications field in recent years has seen development and widespread usage of facsimile machines for rapid and simple transmission of printed documents. In fact, the facsimile machine has, for the most part, replaced telegraph or cable communications so common in years past. Simply, this has occurred because of a major increase in speed of transmission of graphic images over telephone circuitry, and secondly a drop in cost in the machine necessary to undertake conversion of a printed document into a graphic image. The term "telephone circuitry" as used herein is meant to include transmission facilities using wires, fiber optic, wireless or satellite communication for signals from one location to another whether public or private.
Concurrently, computer technology has made vast strides in that some form of a computer is the rule rather than the exception even in the smallest of business firms. With the introduction of the computer, there has been advent of communication between computer terminals. By this, it is meant that textual material stored in one computer system in coded characters can now be transmitted over telephone circuitry to a second computer for manipulation in the second computer. Unfortunately the compatibilitY, of the two computers in this form of communication is critical. Such simple matters as to the coding scheme of the characters (e.g. of eight data bits or seven data bits per character, the presence of parity or not) the transmission and receiving rate (e.g. 300 1200, 2400 bits per second) and the like are critical and thus determine compatibility of communications between computers. Unfortunately, there is no standard for communication between computers.
To the contrary, the facsimile community has recognized the need for compatibility, so that communications between facsimile machines and for that matter between facsimile machines located in different countries presents practically no problems.
Fundamentally there exists a difference between data transmitted from a facsimile machine which is in graphic form and data transmitted between computers which is in a character coded format. Facsimile transmission usually starts with a page of material that may include pictures or graphics in addition to text. The document is scanned by the machine across the width of the page to determine the presence or absence of an image be it a character or a graphic. The scan in a normal page of text consists of 1,728 individual "looks" or pixels across each 81/2 (21.7 cm) line with 1,056 lines per page (a page being 11 inches long or 28 cm). Each pixel may be represented by a 0 or a 1 in a binary format, 0 indicating no image, 1 indicating the presence of an image. In addition, there are coding schemes to reduce the number of pixels transmitted over the telephone line thereby reducing the time taken to send the document. For example, large areas of no textual matter or graphic may be skipped by such a coding scheme. Nevertheless the information gathered by a facsimile machine is eventually represented by a series of ones or zeroes indicating the presence or absence of an image in a rather small area (for example: 0.005 inches wide by 0.01 inches high-0.13 mm.times.26 mm-in the normal scan).
Data, on the other hand, ordinarily is stored in the computer environment by coded characters, the most common code being the ASCII character set (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which consists of a seven bit code permitting 128 different characters. This seven bit ASCII code with the addition of one bit has an extended set thereby providing for 256 distinct characters. (There exist other coding schemes for the Roman alphabet and also somewhat more complex coding schemes for the longer alphabets and even more complex coding schemes for ideographic languages.)
In short, the graphic image of a character as determined by a facsimile machine may, for example consist of a matrix of approximately 10.times.10 pixels or 100 individual bits per typewritten character. Whereas the corresponding ASCII code for that character would be either 7 or 8 bits depending upon the coding structure utilized.
There exists at the present time technology to convert textual matter stored in ASCII or equivalent coded characters into speech. Of course it is understood that the coded characters are arranged in groups to form words and the words in turn are arranged in sentences. (It should also be understood that this discussion, while addressing the English language in the text-to-speech environment, is equally applicable to languages using either an alphabetic system or an ideographic system such as one of the oriental languages.) Thus, if textual matter is stored in a computer in a coded character set, it is possible to convert that text to the spoken word for transmission over telephone circuitry to a remote site.
The term text-to-speech as used in this invention in relation to conversion, includes the conversion to strings of recognizable words into spoken words by means of a "look-up" table of prerecorded words such that the recorded spoken words when assembled can be transmitted to a human listener. The term text-to-speech preferably includes the more fundamental and more flexible procedure of converting strings of individual letters into spoken words through the use of phonemes, where an individual phoneme represents a sound associated with a portion of a letter, a letter or more than one letter, all taken in context with other letters of the same word and in context with a group of words. Text-to-speech, for example, in the first instance would record all the English words using "ough" such as "tough" or "through" or "though. " Whereas in the second instance, the sounds associated with the phonemes for the letters o, u, gh and th, would be combined properly to construct the words. Where appropriate the first text-to-speech conversion will be referred to as recorded speech while the phoneme approach will be referred to as synthetic speech. Where either method is appropriate or a combination is used, the term text-to-speech will be used. It is to be understood that the term text-to-speech is meant to include all methods of non human computerized conversion of written words into human sounds that recognizably convey the words to a listener.
There also exists, at the present time, a capability of converting a graphic image either received from a facsimile machine or from a scanner into coded character sets with the fair degree of accuracy. This first came about in what was called the optical character reader or OCR. Originally, OCR machines were limited to special character fonts. More recently, OCR machines have been developed to read most common fonts (e.g. courier). One of the most recent advances is a software package, available from OCR Systems, Inc. of Bensalem, Pa. sold as ReadRight that can convert scanned text in graphic format to ASCII coded characters.
One of the principal advantages of facsimile technology is almost instantaneous transmission and reception of important information. However, if the intended user of the information is not present at the location of the facsimile receiver, this benefit is lost. The principal problem this invention solves is how to give users remote access to facsimile information in a timely way without the need of reproducing the visual image in the facsimile transmission.
An additional benefit is permitting the remote user to control the eventual disposition of the information in the facsimile message. Without knowledge of addressee, the subject, or the source of a facsimile transmission, it is not possible to make intelligent decisions about how the document should be handled. When the user of this invention has received this kind of information in spoken form, he or she can decide how important it is, whether it should be relayed to another machine, or whether it should be held in memory without being printed to preserve its confidentiality or whether some other disposition should be taken. The invention permits the remote user to effect the desired disposition of the facsimile message utilizing touchtone commands from a remote telephone.
It is an object of this invention to combine the facsimile reception capability with the graphic-image-to-coded-character-set capability and then the conversion of coded character textual matter into the spoken word for retransmission over telephone circuitry.
It is a further object of this invention to add an inquiry capability to the aforesaid combination so that a remote user can inquire as to the status of facsimile messages.
It is still a further object of this invention to include with the facsimile reception and conversion system, a management capability so that incoming facsimile messages may be properly routed to the interested user.
It is still a further object of this invention to include options for the disposition of incoming facsimile messages.
These and other objects of the invention will become more apparent in the ensuing description of the preferred embodiment.